Staluria Ebontree
"You cannot imagine what we have seen; what my Shan'do showed me... What the Satyr showed me. They will never stop, they will never relent. So I will hunt them. I will cut them out of our forests and our streams like a cancer. I will mount a pile of their bodies and carve them into the Nether itself. The Legion decimated everything good about our world, so I will annihilate everything they hold dear." Staluria Ebontree is a merciless Demon Hunter, an expert in military strategy and a seasoned warrior. Once a serving member of the Sentinels Corps (and a veteran of some of the bloodiest wars in history), after the Third War she defected from her post and joined an elusive traditionalist coven of Demon Hunters. Now she seeks to save Azeroth by purging the Burning Legion from the face of the planet and beyond. Having allied with the Human Noble Accord known as the Shadow of Heaven, she now directs the remains of her coven in attacking demons across the face of Azeroth, working to push back the Legion from their shores. History Early Life Due to the chaotic restructuring of Night Elven society after the Sundering, written records on births and deaths are scarce. During the relocation and reorganization of Night Elven society, Staluria and her sister came into the care of her uncle, a known Highborne defector and druidic student, shortly before the purging of the Highborne from Kaldorei society. From early on in life, Staluria had a keen interest in fairness and justice, often proclaiming her wishes to seek out the Wardens and join them in their eternal defense of Night Elven society. Later in her youth, Staluria instead settled on joining the Sentinel Army, enrolling as a Scout and Foot Soldier. The Long Vigil During her long and storied career, Staluria Irontree found herself on the frontlines in many conflicts throughout history. Her first taste of battle would surge forth in the War of the Satyr, turning her positive look on justice into a bitter sardonic attitude of vengeance. Several centuries would later find her in the deserts of Kalimdor, leading a squad of Sentinels in the War of the Shifting Sands, a centuries long conflict which would see the Night Elves pitted against the Qiraji in a battle for the dominance of Kalimdor herself. She would later find a small piece of infamy during the campaign to retake Silithus; in the defeat of a larger part of the Kalimdor Forces, she would lead her squad of Sentinels to retaking several important checkpoints, later securing a small village and holding it for several days against the opposition of Qiraji forces. Shortly after, she would request to be taken off of the front-lines, and was posted as the Guard-Captain of a small village in Ashenvale. She would hold this position in her long vigil for several further centuries. The Third War With the arrival of the Alliance and Horde upon Kalimdor's shores, the Night Elves were once more called to war. Eager to fight the ancient enemy of her people, Staluria immediately volunteered to join the war against the Burning Legion. Sitting on the front lines, she and her Sentinels would frequently clash with Undead Scourge, Burning Legion, and the occasional sect of the New Horde forces. During these conflicts, Staluria would lose her soldiers to the Burning Legion, and her dear sister to the Scourge. After the decisive victory at Mount Hyjal, Staluria returned to her post to find her village and its denizens burning, decimated by an opportunistic attack against the Burning Legion and several Satyr allies. Having lost everything, Staluria forsook her posting as a Sentinel Captain and began a path of vengeance. The Demon's Crown It would take little time before she directed her rage upon demon kind, armed with only what little tools she could carry she began a one-elf crusade on demon-kind. In her sloppy killing she would be approached by an elusive coven of Demon Hunters known as the Demon's Crown, a group who had come together to survive out of necessity. While initially offput by any sort of ties to the disciples or copiers of Illidain Stormrage, she later accepted their aid and they directed her wrath upon the targets she saw. Later, as she realized the depth of the Burning Legion and their remaining foothold on Azeroth, she would swear herself to the Demon's Crown and would succesfully complete the Demon Hunter Rites and Rituals, being reborn as the Ebontree of Azeroth. In her training and further hunting, Staluria would eventually reconcile the changes with her concurrent faith, and would change her outlook on the situation; her transformation became less a burden of necessity and more of a self-sacrifice to protect Azeroth. The Ashbourne Campaign Several decades would pass and Staluria would find herself pulled into the world once again. As the Lich King resurfaced in the north, several bodies and organizations began to seek out any edge possible in fighting the seemingly endless Scourge. Taking such an opportunity, the Ashbourne Brigade, a unit of Paladins, Death Knights and Alliance Forces, sought out the elusive Demon's Crown and recruited them to their cause. While initially hesitant, Staluria and her coven eventually relented and joined the Ashbourne, engaging with them on several fronts in Northrend. Using their specific skill-sets, the Highlord Tania Ashbourne utilized her allies as advanced scouts and infiltration specialists, decimating Necromantic squads and Liches in the Northrend Campaign. Things, in the end, would come to a screeching halt for the Ashbourne. Unbeknownst to many of them, one of the Brigade's members had been taken over by a fel-force, and at the Demon's bidding the Ashbourne was corrupted from within; seeds of betrayal were planted as the minds of many were twisted in the dark whispers of a great demon. Civil war broke out among the Ashbourne, and at every turn the Demon's Crown were met with a new foe. Eventually, one of their own members succumbed to the will of their enemy, and they were nearly decimated. Eventually, after many fallen friends and foes, the Demon's Crown (along with the surviving Ashbourne) turned against the demonic entity and imprisoned it on Azeroth, binding it and rendering it completely immobile. Taking the keys of it's power, several ancient Void Artifacts, the Ashbourne scattered them, locking them away across the world. With her Shan'do and coven decimated or imprisoned, Staluria was asked to take one and secret away to a place where not even a Dreadlord could locate it. Seeing no other point to her existence, the remains of her 'family' destroyed, she forsook her glaives and reluctantly agreed. The Great Dark and the New Light With the assistance of several powerful wizards and the remaining knowledge of the Ashbourne's greatest magical researcher, Staluria entered a self-imposed exile within a pocket dimension of the Great Dark Beyond. There, she tasked herself with looking over one of the relics, known as the Apoch's Core, and remained in her vigil for eight long years. On the outside world the Ashbourne disbanded. Several were driven away by their grief at what had transpired, others were broken from combat entirely. It was decided by the Ashen Council that their forces were too broken to continue under the same banner and without their Highlord, there could be no figurehead for unity. And so Staluria waited, hoping, praying that one day she would be relieved of her watch. Hope turned to hopelessness. Hopelessness turned to hatred. Hatred turned into something darker. It would only be when Larregis Blackheart, a Death Knight and one of the most powerful Arcane Spellworkers of the Ashbourne, unleashed a second demonic entity on the world that she would see the Light of Day again. In her prison, he and his associates relieved her of the artifact, and attempted to bring her back out into the world. Unable to part with her charge, and her hatred of the Death Knight's mistakes still fresh in her mind, she refused to leave the unstable accord alone to their work, and maintained her watch until the relic was destroyed. Now allied with the Shadow of Heaven accord, Staluria seeks to rebuild her coven as the last of the Demon's Crown, looking to exact vengeance on the Burning Legion once more. Physical Traits and Appearance Staluria is tall, as most of her kin are, the tips of her ears scraping a respectable seven feet. With a lithe figure meant for stalking through forests and jungles, her legs and arms are built for swiftness and stealth instead of all out brawling, her bust slighter than the rest of her kind. The tattoos on her face mark her passage into adulthood, the meager workings denoting a rather plain lifestyle, done as her rite of passage into the Sentinels. Her darkened skin must have once been beautiful, a twilight purple. Her blackened hair is usually cropped short, improperly done with a sharp, bladed instrument. That is where the similarities to her birth-people end and the corruption of the demon's blood begins. Two horns curve outward from her head, often roughly filed down to no doubt keep them manageable. Where two silvery eyes once sat, now all that remains are two gaping sockets, the embers of a bright fel flame burning where eyes once sat. All around the sockets are a terrible scarring, claw marks having torn apart the flesh in a desperate gambit to remove them. Her face is now dotted in the first beginnings of protective spikes, her teeth formed into razored points by her feasting on demon flesh. Her lips have long since chapped and cracked, misshaping them. Her once perfect skin has formed into a rocky shell, the pockmarked surface like darkened Elementium to the touch and just as hard, somehow still stretching over itself impossibly. Fel-Green wards are tattooed all around her torso, running up her arms, across her back, under her breasts, along her neck, and down towards her legs in strange, interlocking patterns. Billowing out from her back are two mighty wings, tattooed and darkened in the same way, ragged from years of abuse and use. Adorning each finger is a razored talon, ready to slice and tear what her warglaives cannot. Her ears, unlike the rest of her skin, are layered in the beginning of hardened scales, stretching out all along up to the very tips. Her armour is a strange mish-mash of craftsman-ship, no doubt once original plating to some several demons. Instead the antiqued pieces have been worked over by the original members of the Demon's Crown, and in her rites Staluria has gained access to the material. Forgoing a traditional breastplate and armour, she has instead picked several larger pieces to cover vital areas; grieves, gauntlets and thigh-plates are truly the only plate armour she possesses, intended to absorb most of the blunt force trauma. The rest of her equipment is instead supplemented with several varieties of beast-hide; her thigh-plates are attached to crokilisk scale leggings, her shoulders are made out of worg-leather, and her cowl appears to have been woven from Felhound hide. As a Sentinel, Staluria was trained in a wide variety of weapons, but as a Demon Hunter she now mostly specializes in Warglaives and Targe-Shields. Currently, she possesses a main-hand warglaive and an off-hand arm-targe; a long, lightweight shield that stretches from beyond the hand to up past the shoulder. Such shield half-walls are often bladed along one edge, and hers is no exception, often using it as a punching weapon when she is not deflecting minor attacks or spells with it. This is not to say her arsenal is so simple, she also possesses several throwing knives and her (un)natural demonic gifts. While she is by no means and accomplished warlock or spellcaster, she has been seen to use fel-fire as part of her arsenal, using her claws, spikes, talons and more to gain the upper hand in combat. Personality Traits An isolationist by nature, Staluria has long known the loneliness of leadership and the isolation of self-improvement. While she is not aggressive towards non-fel oriented mortals, she is content in her own independence. This is not to say she is not social; far from the contrary. While she dislikes large bodies of people, the Huntress can easily berate back and forth with the best of them. Surprisingly, despite all she and her people have gone through, Staluria has a deep reverence of life and all those who protect those lesser than them. Unlike many, though, she has an almost vicious form of sarcasm from her lot in life; quick to point out the obvious fallacies and foolishness of any granted situation. That, however, does not stop her from remaining cordial to those she associates with, but it does often put her at odds with those first meeting her. Staluria also manages to continue to practice her faith for Elune, believing that the path she now walks (as everyone walks in their own way) is dictated by the goddess, and will not steer her wrong. She maintains an incredible reverence for the natural world, believing that any taint upon Azeroth's natural form should be purged. Many would call her a near-fanatic for the Moon Goddess and the Ancients, but she believes that they are the heart of Azeroth and deserve the greatest protection against its enemies. She takes this faith into the management of her coven, the Demon's Crown. As its last true student, she see it as a Hunter's duty to protect Azeroth and its people against the Burning Legion, and truly believes it to be a sacred duty that only those willing to sacrifice anything could ever hope to perform. Like many Night Elves, Staluria is extremely bitter and hateful of the Burning Legion, seeing them above all else as Azeroth's single greatest threat. While she can appear almost socially "normal" in comparison to other Night Elves, when it comes to the Legion she knows only hatred and a burning lust for vengeance. Above anything else, Staluria will forsake everything if it means a shot at irreparably damaging the Burning Legion. While opposed to the xenophobic views of many conservative Night Elves, Staluria has an intense distrust of Illidari Hunters and Fel-Oriented mortals, wary of Warlocks and the like. Ultimately, she values those close to her, she cherishes all of Azeroth's varied inhabitants, but tinted through her gaze of self-sacrifice and the cruelty of war she knows that only absolutes can oppose her enemies. Anything less than total victory is meaningless. Category:Night Elf Category:Demon Hunters Category:Sentinel Army Category:Sentinels Category:Characters